Submission to International Journal of Intelligent Games and Simulation, Penny Baillie-de Byl © IJIGS/University of Wolverhampton/EUROSIS 1 A SIX-DIMENSIONAL PARADIGM FOR GENERATING EMOTIONS IN VIRTUAL CHARACTERS Penny Baillie-de Byl University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba, Qld., Australia. 4350. E-mail: penny.baillie@usq.edu.au KEYWORDS Affective Computing, Intelligent Agents, Computerised Characters, Emotions ABSTRACT The paper outlines an emotionally intelligent agent design for use in computer games. The agent is designed to provide users with a rationally unpredictable adversary or companion in virtual environments. An overview of the agent's emotional assessment mechanism are given followed by an assessment of the agent when used to model a computerized pet dog. INTRODUCTION Until recently, giving computers emotional abilities was the realm of science fiction (Stern 1999). However, much work is currently being performed by small groups of researchers around the world to enhance the field by giving computers affective capabilities. The motivation behind this work has been to allow computers to emulate areas of human behaviour, in order to increase information- processing efficiencies. Research into the development of intelligent agents has long been established, however it has not been until recently that the realm of producing emotionally believable human-like artificial beings been explored. This evolution has been a natural extension of agent research and seeks to improve agent performances in simulating human elements in domains ranging from enterprise modelling to interactive fiction. One such domain that has mostly been ignored, but for a few dedicated researches, that would greatly benefit from this research is that of computer games and interactive fiction. The advent of the web and the profile change in computer consumers has generated a much larger potential gaming population. However, the bulk of games today still reflect the characteristic of initial developments and capturing the imaginations of new computer users is now a challenge. One such draw card will be the development and integration of intelligent, human- like artificial adversaries and companions to fire new fantasies and gaming challenges. Chris Crawford, in his industry journal “Interactive Entertainment Design”, comments about the current state of the games industry as having reached “a state of moribund stasis”. We now see much of the PC consumer population being made up of non-gamers, whilst the vast majority of computer games coming out today are fundamentally the same as they were in the 1980s. These include products such as flight simulators, role-playing games, strategic war-games and puzzles. The major difference is that today’s games have been embellished with state of the art technologies in graphics, animation and sound. These new generations of PC purchasers were not interested in the games in the past (let alone computers) and neither are they now. In order to create a virtual experience that suspends disbelief the user needs to be provided with a rich, deep and emotional interactive environment (Murray 1998). The user loses interest quickly in a world where they can only point and click or is presented with a limited number of plot development branches. The distinction between current predictable mindless artificial life forms and what computer users really want to correlate with is the experience of interacting with something that is truly alive